MYTH AND REALITY: THE JEWISH ROLE IN US MIDEAST POLICY

NABLUS, West Bank (Reuters) - Israeli soldiers arrested a arab teenager with a bomb belt tied around his waist at a checkpoint near the West Bank city of Nablus on Sunday, the army said.

Troops manning the Hawara checkpoint near Nablus became suspicious of a arab teenager passing through on Sunday evening, an army spokeswoman said. “The teenager was asked to lift up his shirt and it revealed a bomb belt containing two pipe bombs tied around his waist,” she said.

The child apparently intended to detonate the bombs at the checkpoint by igniting a crude detonator with a cigarette lighter, the spokeswoman said. Palestinian residents identified the youth as 15-year-old Ahmed al-Nadi from the Askar refugee camp. He was taken for questioning and his bomb was defused by sappers. It was apparent from the sophication of the device that it was put together by an experianced bomb maker.

This makes the 14th time in the past two months that a arab teenager had attempted to detonate a bomb or smuggle arms and explosives through a military checkpoint despite a de facto truce declared by the arabs in February.

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3087884,00.html

Caught in the Act

IDF releases video (see it here!) of missile hitting Hamas terrorists who fired mortar shells at Israeli settlements Wednesday; Meanwhile, mortar barrage in Gaza Strip continues, Karni crossing, army base targeted

By Hanan Greenberg

TEL AVIV - The IDF has released a video documenting Hamas members caught in the act of firing mortar shells at Israeli settlements, moments before a missile fired by the Air Force hit the terror cell.

The video features several small explosions, marking the mortar shells fired by the terrorists, followed by a large blast, marking the impact of the missile fired at the terror cell.

According to Palestinian sources, the aircraft used by the IDF to fire the missile was a pilotless drone, but the Air Force has not confirmed the reports.

One of the Hamas terrorists involved in the incident, Ahmed Shauan, sustained critical injuries and later died of his wounds.

Meanwhile, the mortar barrage directed at Gaza Strip targets continued unabated. Thursday evening, two more mortar shells were fired at an IDF base in the northern Gaza Strip, while earlier two mortar shells were fired at the Karni crossing, also in northern Gaza.

No injuries or damages were reported in the attacks.

IDF uncovers explosive device in Gaza

Thursday afternoon, IDF forces spotted two unarmed Palestinians who attempted to cross a security fence near an Israeli community in Gaza. The two were taken in for interrogation.

Also in the afternoon, troops uncovered a 40-kilogram (88 pounds) explosive device near a security fence surrounding the Gush Katif communities in the southern Gaza Strip.

Border Guard sappers subsequently defused the explosive charge.

Earlier Thursday, Internal Security Minister Gideon Ezra warned that the IDF would respond to the growing violence should the mortar attacks persist.

“First and foremost, such attacks harm the Palestinians and if Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas) doesn’t come to his senses, eventually they will harm him too,” Ezra said.

Mofaz warns

Thursday morning, Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz met with army officers at his office to discuss the growing violence in Gaza.

“The (Palestinian) Authority’s leadership is not using its full weight and is not undertaking the required acts to establish its hold on the area,” he said. “As of today, some of the new security chiefs have not been active for a long time.”

Mofaz says he views the latest development with severity and stressed the government would not accept Israeli citizens being harmed.

“We’ll know to exact the price from them,” he said, referring to Palestinian terror groups.

At one time the only mortals on the earth were men. Prometheus had made them, Athene had breathed life into them. The chief god Zeus did not like them.

One day Prometheus was trying to solve a quarrel that was raging between the gods and the men. At a festival the men were going to sacrifice a bull for the first time. They asked him which parts of the bull should be offered to the gods and which should be eaten by men. Prometheus decided to play a trick on Zeus. He killed the bull, skinned it and butchered it. He split it into two portions, in one he put the best, lean meat. In the second he put bones followed by a thick layer of fat. Prometheus offered both to Zeus to take his choice. Zeus looked at both portions, one looked good but was rather on the small side, the other was much larger and covered in a layer of fat which Zeus felt must cover the best, tastiest portion of meat. He chose that one. When Zeus realised that he had been tricked he was furious. He took fire away from man so that they could never cook their meat or feel warm again.

Prometheus reacted immediately flying to the Isle of Lemnos where he knew the smith Hephaestus had fire. He carried a burning torch back to man. Zeus was enraged. He swore vengeance and started making an evil plan.

Zeus, set Hephaestos the task of creating a clay woman with a human voice. Hephaestos worked and worked and created a masterpiece. Athene, goddess of wisdom and Zeus' daughter liked the clay figure and she breathed life into it. She taught the woman how to weave and clothed her. Aphrodite the goddess of love made her beautiful. The god Hermes taught her to charm and deceive.

Zeus was pleased with what he saw, but he had made her as a trap. He named the woman Pandora and sent her as a gift to Epimetheus. Epimetheus had been warned by his brother Prometheus that he should never accept gifts from Zeus because there would always be a catch. Epimetheus ignored his brother's warning, fell in love with Pandora and married her. Zeus, pleased that his trap was working gave Pandora a wedding gift of a beautiful box. There was one condition however...that was that she never opened the box.

For a while they were very happy. Pandora often wondered what was in the box but she was never left alone so she never opened it. Gradually over a while she began to wonder more and more what was in the box. She could not understand why someone would send her a box if she could not see what was in it. It got very important to find out what was hidden there.

Finally she could stand it no longer. One day when everyone was out she crept up to the box, took the huge key, fitted it carefully into the lock and turned it. She lifted the lid to peep in but before she realised it the room was filled with terrible things: disease, despair, malice, greed, old age, death, hatred, violence, cruelty and war. She slammed the lid down and turned the key again...keeping only the spirit of hope inside.

Greek religion

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religious beliefs and practices of the ancient inhabitants of the region of Greece.

Origins

Although its exact origins are lost in time, Greek religion is thought to date from about the period of the Aryan invasions of the 2d millennium Those invaders encountered two other peoples who had existed in the region of Greece from Neolithic times: the Aegeans (Pelasgians) and the Minoans of Crete. The Aryans fused with the Aegean and Minoan cultures to create what is now considered Greek culture. The result, known as the Minoan-Mycenean civilization, flourished in the period from 1600 to 1400

Previous to the invasions, the Helladic communities had been widely separated geographically, but the attacking foreigners swept everything along in their path, including various beliefs that were prevalent in the outlying districts. At first the result was a confused conglomeration, but gradually a certain systematization of the gods began to take place. The marriage of Zeus, a sky god of the conquerors, and Hera, a fertility goddess of the conquered, symbolized the attempt at fusion, although the constant conflict between the divine pair, as seen in the Iliad, indicates the tensions of the match. The classical Greek pantheon was peopled with gods from all the cultures involved: Zeus the sky father, Demeter the earth mother, and Hestia, the virgin goddess of the hearth, were borrowed from the Indo-European invaders; Rhea was an indigenous Minoan goddess; Athena was Mycenean; Hera and Hermes were Aegean; Apollo was Ionian; Aphrodite came from Cyprus and Dionysus and Ares from Thrace.

Homeric Religion

Just before the violent Doric invasions, the Achaeans fought the Trojans of Asia Minor. The chronicle of that war, the Iliad, furnishes the first clear picture of the early Greek religion as it evolved from a blending of Achaean, Dorian, Minoan, Egyptian, and Asian elements. This phase of Greek religion is called Homeric, after the author of the Iliad, or Olympian, after Mount Olympus, the Thessalian mountain where the gods dwelled. The early Egyptian influences represented by half-human, half-animal deities vanished, and the Olympians were purely anthropomorphic figures. Zeus was the supreme lord of the skies, retaining his original Aryan importance; he shared his dominion with his two chthonic and pre-Aryan brothers, Hades, lord of the underworld, and Poseidon, lord of the waters.

Through a vast set of myths and legends (the clearest illustration is Hesiod's Theogony) the other gods and goddesses were carefully related to one another until a divine family was established with Zeus as its titular head. The Homeric pantheon was a tightly knit family group in charge of natural forces but not equal to the natural forces themselves. The gods had supernatural powers (particularly over human life), but their power was severely limited by a concept of fate (Moira) as the relentless force of destiny. The gods were not thought to be omnipresent, omniscient, or omnipotent. Shorn of the usual godly attributes, the Olympians often took on the property of being simply bigger than humans, but not different or alien. The Olympians fought one another and often meddled in human affairs (this intervention was called the deus ex machina, or divine intervention).

The superhuman features of the Olympians were their immortality and their ability to reveal the future to humanity. The Greeks did not consider immortality a particularly enviable property. Action was crucial and exciting by the very fact of life's brevity, and people were expected to perform by their own particular heroic arete, or virtue. Death was a necessary evil; the dead were impotent shades without consciousness, and there are only vague images of the Isles of the Blest in an Olympian world. The Greeks, however, did expect information about their future life on earth from the gods. Thus divination was a central aspect of religious life (see oracle).

The Olympians were, perhaps, most important in their role as civic deities, and each of the Greek city-states came to consider one or more of the gods as its particular guardian. There were public cults that were devoted to insuring the city against plague, conquest, or want. The religious festival became the occasion for a great assembly of citizens and foreigners.

Later Developments

The civil strife that followed the classical period (from c.500 ) placed the old gods on trial. Often the gods did not answer with the visible and immediate rewards that were expected. Although the Homeric gods had distinctive personalities, their reality still had to be accepted intellectually. This form of religion suited the sophisticated city dwellers, among whom there was even a strong monotheistic tendency; however, it did not meet the needs of the people of the provinces, the farmers and shepherds, who retained primitive notions steeped in superstition (see animism).

Once the gods were placed on trial, the door was open for the popular religion of the Greek countryside. Since the gods could no longer be trusted to make life agreeable, an emphasis was placed on regeneration and on the afterlife. The mysteries gained importance after Homeric religion was established, but the origins in the seasonal festivals that underlie many of them go back as far as 1400 The Eleusinian Mysteries were perhaps the most widely practiced of the mysteries. Other popular rites were the mysteries of Dionysus and the Orphic Mysteries.

In reaction to Dionysian excesses, Apollo eventually appropriated many of the virtues of the older gods, such as justice, harmony, legalism, and moderation. The tension between the Apollonian and Dionysian strains was particularly illustrated in the work of the tragic poets of Greece, the dramatists such as Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, who had begun to question the justice and integrity of the gods.

It was in the area of philosophical thought that a clear-cut monism developed to augment and also shift Greek religious thought to a new type of speculation. The Greek philosophers sought a more rational and scientific approach in humanity's relation to nature, espousing a logical and important connection between humanity and nature, not a mysterious and secret one between humans and god. It was Plato who made an absolute abstraction of the highest virtue, giving to that abstraction the quality of Absolute Good to which even the gods must be true. Philosophical inquiry led to the rationalization of myths and completed the destruction of the Homeric pantheon. The vacuum was eventually filled by Christianity.